Lincoln Center was a fledgling English language school when I first arrived in Albania from the U.S. in 2004 on a Fulbright Scholarship.  Since then, it has grown into one of the finest learning institutions in Albania, offering many foreign language classes as well as a course called GrapeSEED, that teaches children to speak English like a native.  I feel privileged to teach at Lincoln Center.

My classes in English Writing and another on Advanced English Conversation, with an emphasis on pronunciation and American idioms, were designed to help professionals overcome such weaknesses that are common—even among the most advanced English-speaking Albanians.  In spite of expected difficulties, students attending these classes are above average in their language skills and seem to have little trouble handling tricky grammatical quizzes, tongue-twisting vocabulary pronunciation and baffling American idioms, such as  “A Chip On Your Shoulder” or “A Dime A Dozen.” It ‘s been amazing to find that many idiomatic expressions originate in the Bible: Doubting Thomas (John 20:24-29); A Drop In The Bucket (Isaiah 40:15); A Leopard Cannot Change His Spots (Jeremiah 13:23); A House Divided Cannot Stand (Matthew 12:25).  

Happily, students in the writing class are already well versed in writing business emails, letters, reports and press releases, and simply need a bit fine-tuning to improve sentence structure, vocabulary and idiom.  In this class we learn how to express ourselves easily and naturally, without the stiffness of no longer useful excessively formal writing.  Try one of our “loosening up” exercises: think of a happy episode in your early childhood and write the story in the voice of the child who experienced it—grammatical mistakes and all. Then rewrite it correctly in the past tense, in an adult voice, as a story that had happened—as in a memoir. You’ll find your writing free-er, looser and more appealing.

-Rose Dosti